What do you know: it's Saturday and voting has already started. Polling stations are open in Saint Pierre and Miquelon, French Caribbean islands like Guadeloupe, Martinique or St Martin (the French half that is), French Guyana, French Polynesia and also in various French consulates across the Americas. Situations seems to have improved in Montréal were the voters had to stand in line for several hours two weeks ago.

Moving westward, tomorrow, polling stations will open in New Caledonia, Wallis & Futuna and French consulates in Oceania, Asia and Europe. Polling stations in mainland France will be open at 8:00 CEST (UTC+2) and will close at 19:00 CEST in most places, 20:00 in "big cities". As for the first round, two weeks ago, all polls are under embargo, by law, until the 20:00 closure time. Of course, the embargo doesn't apply to Belgian and Swiss media.

Polling stations are open since 8:00 this morning in mainland France. Polls are also open in overseas territories like Réunion island, New Caledonia and various French consulates throughout Asia, Oceania, Africa and Europe: pretty much all places west of the International Date Line up to the eastern shores of the Atlantic (including UK, Ireland, Portugal, Morocco and western Africa). For instance, there are 54 polling stations in the UK (42 in London - source).

For the Americas, Caribbean and Pacific islands east of the International Date Line, the polls were held yesterday, due to the time difference. At the French consulate in Washington DC, voter registration was up 30%. In Montréal, only a single polling place was open and the line stretched for more than 1 km; same in Toronto where the voters had to wait in line for more than 2 hours.

With two weeks to go until the first round, the Presidential contest has entered the official phase: since this Monday, the media are obliged by law to give equal time to each and every candidate, regardless of notoriety, or big party backing her or him. Each candidate will also have the opportunity to air their own 15 minutes segments for free on public TV.

For instance, Philipe Poutou, a factory car worker at a Ford Motor Company plant near Bordeaux, running for the Trotskyst "New Antcapitalist Party", will get the same air time on national television than the other candidates like Macron, Fillon or Le Pen.

Since my first diary, the race for the coveted second round runoff on May 7 has been led by Le Pen and Macron in the polls. The recent developments seem to be Macron's support tapering off, but still keeping in the same range as Le Pen, with Mélenchon clearly rising over Hamon, the official PS candidate that many PS officials are openly betraying.

The scandal ridden Fillon is still polling several points behind the two front runners and about level with Mélenchon. But no matter what, even though this looks like "a four horse race" (to quote eurogreen), there's only room for two in the second round. So who will they be?

After the Netherlands, France is next in line in the EU 2017 elections cycle. It'll start in about four weeks from now with the first round of presidential elections on Sunday 23 April.

There are 11 contenders for this first round and only the first two will face each other in a run off two weeks later, on Sunday 7 May.
But French voters won't be done with visiting their polling stations this spring yet: Sunday 11 June will be the first round of "legislative" elections to renew the 577 members of the National Assembly, with a second round scheduled the following Sunday, on 18 June.

To some extent, the parliamentary elections may be even more important to determine the direction of French policies, as I argued in my diary, five years ago.
But let's start with the Presidential contest.

Until last Friday, when Brexit was just a possibility and European governments were drawing contingency plans, there was a consensus that, should it come to pass, within a week or so, David Cameron, or his successor, would arrive at a special European summit to officially announce UK's intention to start the leave process and trigger the famous article 50.

At least, this is more or less what most people were expecting.
Well, it looks like the British leadership will eventually start negotiations with the EU27, but they're going to take their sweet time doing so.

Cameron said it would be best for his successor to negotiate the terms of Britain's exit - and to trigger article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, which begins the formal process of withdrawal, adding that he had already discussed his intentions with the Queen.

The prime minister promised to stay on until the autumn, to "steady the ship"; but suggested a new leader should be in place by the start of the Conservative party's conference in October.

Spring 2012: the financial crisis that struck four years ago has thrown more people into unemployment and the economy has still not recovered. The ECB is running a tight money policy and the official priority of the Eurozone is to reduce state debt and budget deficits. Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland have been subjected to austerity policies, with the understanding that Italy and maybe France may be further down the line.

In France, outgoing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is running for re-election. It's an uphill battle: unemployment has increased during his term and for those who still have a job, their wages have stagnated or even receded. The economy hasn't recovered to pre-recession levels. Many are calling for the ECB to do more to "support economic growth" in addition to its main mandate to keep inflation in check; Sarkozy eventually joined this choir:

Germany on Monday rebuffed calls by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to extend the mandate of the European Central Bank (ECB) to include supporting economic growth, citing the central bank's independence.

"The German position on the ECB and its independent role is known and is also known in Paris and has been unchanged for a long time," Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters.

What is true of the airline industry is increasingly true of America's economy as a whole. Profits have risen in most rich countries over the past ten years but the increase has been biggest for American firms. Coupled with an increasing concentration of ownership, this means the fruits of economic growth are being hoarded. This is probably part of the reason that two-thirds of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, have come to believe that the economy "unfairly favours powerful interests", according to polling by Pew, a research outfit. It means that when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the Democratic contenders for president, say that the economy is "rigged", they have a point.

Profits are an essential part of capitalism. They give investors a return, encourage innovation and signal where resources should be invested. Their accumulation allows investment in bold new ventures. Countries where profits are too low--Japan, for instance--can slip into morbid torpor. Firms that ignore profits, such as China's state-run enterprises, lurch around like aimless zombies, as likely to destroy value as to create it.

But high profits across a whole economy can be a sign of sickness. They can signal the existence of firms more adept at siphoning wealth off than creating it afresh, such as those that exploit monopolies. If companies capture more profits than they can spend, it can lead to a shortfall of demand. This has been a pressing problem in America. It is not that firms are underinvesting by historical standards. Relative to assets, sales and GDP, the level of investment is pretty normal. But domestic cash flows are so high that they still have pots of cash left over after investment: about $800 billion a year.

Well, it's official. And it's been doing the headlines all over the French media today (Wed. Feb. 20): French workers are lazy, they only work three hours a day, have a full hour lunch break and they expect American businessmen to take over their ailing tire manufacturing plant. "How stupid do you think we are?" says Maurice Taylor, aka "The Grizz," CEO of Titan International.

Taylor had been approached by Arnaud Montebourg, Minister of Industrial Renewal in the French government, known for his outspoken ways.

Taylor, who is nicknamed "The Grizz," wrote the no-holds-barred letter to French Industrial Renewal Minister Arnaud Montebourg to explain why his company wouldn't buy part of an ailing Goodyear factory in Amiens. The ministry confirmed the letter as authentic however attempts to obtain comment from Titan have been unsuccessful.

"I have visited the factory a couple of times," the letter date Feb. 8 reads, according to a copy published Wednesday in Les Echos newspaper.

"The French workforce gets paid high wages but only work for three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that's the French way!"

Titan International plays on the hard reputation of its CEO, who also made an attempt to run for U.S. President in 1996 for the Republicans. The company's website features a biography explaining that the nickname comes from his "tough negotiating style" in Washington as well as a logo and sound of a roaring grizzly bear wearing shades.

Now that the presidential elections are behind us, the next challenge for the PS and President-elect Hollande are the upcoming parliamentary elections scheduled for Sunday, June 10 (first round) and June 17 (second round).

It looks like we, the French, love the republic so much that we wanted several of them: France's current political regime is called the Fifth Republic, and was established by de Gaulle in 1958.

It is said that the 1958 constitution was tailor-made for de Gaulle and turned the Fifth Republic into a 'presidential regime', like the United States or Mexico, as opposed to, say, Germany or Italy, where the presidential position is mostly honorific and the real power is with the Federal Chancellor or the Prime Minister.

However, even under the Fifth Republic, the President is still very much dependent on the Parliament: the President appoints the Prime Minister and the cabinet members, but the National Assembly, the lower house of the Parliament, can overthrow the government by voting a censure motion (it has happened only once, in 1962).

In keeping with the strong anti-German tradition we have developed on this site (just kidding: I've lived in Germany and even though my German is a bit rusty, I still understand the language somehow), let me quote something I stumbled upon in Der Spiegel.

The current euro clusterfuck debate has been often framed by the German elite as the virtuous and hard working North vs. the lazy and profligate South, starting with Frau Bundeskanzlerin herself. Not to mention the Bild tabloid (the German Daily Fail) crying: "They all want our money!"

The zeal in retrieving money in just every corner sometimes goes a little bit too far and is not always directed at Southern Europe. To wit:

The German government demands that a tax would be paid on pensions received by foreigners who were compelled to do forced labour during World War II. The news sparks indignation and preoccupation among Belgians enjoying these pensions, either former labourers or their widows.

Needless to say, this didn't go down well at all in Belgium.

Anyway, for the past years, Merkel, Schäuble, Stark: all seem to be pushing the same message: "You must pay your debt, up to the last penny, like all responsible people do".

Not so fast, say some discording voices. Here's a Munich born historian who is taking a critical look at the German government's track record in dealing with its own debt, and he's not exactly mincing his words:

We were spending a week-end in a rental house in la Plaine des Cafres, one of the high plains connecting the two main mountain ranges, with family and a couple of friends... Being at 1200m elevation la Plaine des Cafres is usually a nice resort to escape the heat from the coastal area; but this is spring time and the weather was cold and damp; okay, 'cold' means about 12°C but that's quite cold for the locals. Anyway, it was raining and after a small walk in a nearby forest with plenty of wild flowers, we settled in front of the satellite TV to spend the late Saturday morning watching the French rugby team trouncing England in Eden Park.

After lunch, my brother had a quick discussion with his brother in law: it was still rainy, but it might be possible that the volcano is actually above the clouds. The only way was to drive there and find out for ourselves, so off we went.

Satellite view of the piton de la Fournaise, from NASA (via Wiki). The Dolomieu crater is visible in the middle. On the western side: Plaine des Cafres, Plaine des Sable, Pas de Bellecombe and the caldera rim of Enclos Fouqué. On the eastern side, several lava flows, including the 2007 vintage that wen straight into the ocean.

Last October, my wife and I visited the island of la Réunion, both for a vacation and a family visit (my brother lives there).
La Réunion is a volcanic island in the Southern Indian Ocean, about 200 km from Mauritius.

While both islands are volcanic in origin, la Réunion is much younger - geologically speaking - than its neighbor Mauritius where the erosion has smoothed the terrain over the ages, allowing for a large coral reef lagoon and white sand beaches to develop. La Réunion on the other end is barely three million years ago, created out of two volcanoes: Piton des Neiges and Piton de la Fournaise (all mountain peaks on the island are called "pitons"). The Piton des Neiges is no longer active and three volcanic calderas around it have collapsed over time, creating the three main cirques in the middle of the island: Cirque de Salazie, Cirque de Cilaos and Cirque de Mafate. The Piton de la Fournaise is still very much an active volcano: no eruption while we were there (sadly), but the last one was in December 2010. The two mountain ranges are connected by high plateaus called "plaines": La Plaine des Palmistes and La Plaine des Cafres.

So the terrain on Réunion island is much more rugged than in Mauritius: there are only a few coral lagoons and a limited number of beaches, mostly on the West coast (also called "côte sous le vent" - leeward coast), such as Boucan Canot or Saint Gilles. Actually, the most spectacular features of La Réunion are inland: in 2010, the "pitons, cirques and remparts (cliffs)" have been officially listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Visitors and natives alike are hiking the mountain trails, and Sunday family picnics up in "les hauts" (the heights) are a strongly rooted tradition.

Satellite view of Réunion island, from NASA (via Wiki). More pictures to follow below the fold...

You read ET, so you know that "France's AAA rating has become the subject of French Presidential Election Campaign Football" (h/t Migeru). In addition, president Nicolas Sarkozy and prime minister François Fillon have devised another issue: modify the French constitution to make budget deficits illegal, following in Germany's footsteps. This so-called "règle d'or" -- "Golden Rule", is predictably enough used by the UMP (Sarkozy's party) as a weapon to beat the French Socialist with in the run-up to the next presidential elections in May 2012: either the PS accept this "Golden Rule" and get in full TINA mode onto the austerity bandwagon or they reject the poisonous gift and will be immediately tarred as "irresponsible". Heads the UMP wins, tails the PS loses.

Sarkozy's camp is hoping for a repeat of the 2007 presidential race when they successfully portrayed Ségolène Royal as "incompetent" with the help of compliant media while Sarkozy was looking "presidential"; of course, this was before Le Fouquet's, "Casse-toi, pauvre con" and other fixtures of the bling-bling era supposedly long gone by now.

In the wake of last weekend's "no-business meeting" between Sarkozy and Merkel, long on the hand waving but short on any concrete action, Sarkozy's prime minister François Fillon, who just came back from his Tuscan summer vacation, published an editorial in Le Figaro (August 19), a broadsheet who is to the UMP what Fox News is to the GOP. In this editorial, Fillon is calling for no less than national unity behind the golden rule:

One thing that struck me with the Wikileaks cables, is the overall good quality of the analysis -- regardless what you think of their orientation -- showing in general a high level of professionalism among the US diplomatic corps.

There was a time when the French diplomats too were reputed for the quality of their work and the networks they were setting all over the globe. However in recent years, career diplomats are increasingly being replaced with yes-men or people who have no higher qualification than being close to the French president and his ruling party.

Case in point: Remember the colossal blunder of previous French ambassador in Tunisia, Pierre Ménat?

At the height of the "jasmine revolution", on Friday January 13, Ambassador Ménat famously sent a diplomatic cable to Paris, stating that Ben Ali had "retaken the situation in hand".

A mere couple of hours later Ben Ali and his clan were fleeing to Saudi Arabia...

Sarkozy was unsurprisingly angry after Ménat who was recalled a few days later.

After such a gaffe, you'd think President Sarkozy would be careful in replacing him with an experienced diplomat who would spare no efforts to continue good relations with Tunisia and generally behave, well, diplomatic.

I haven't had the time to chime in on the subject (and join in the fun?), but I'm in an off-site meeting this afternoon and not all subjects covered there are equally interesting :)

It all started a couple of weeks ago when a couple of lawmakers decided to start a workgroup on the burqa wearing in France; it was supposed to be just a study group, with right wing as well as left wing lawmakers, united by the traditional French secularism ("laïcité").

Until the President, N.Sarkozy, decided this was to good a wedge issue to be left to the Parliament, that is.

Last Thursday night, our fearless president invited himself on three -- count them, three -- national TV channels for one hour and a half prime time interview by four journalists from these three most widely viewed TV channels: France 2, the public channel whose top boss will be now directly appointed by Sarkozy himself (a recently voted law), TF1 and M6, whose owners, Martin Bouygues and Vincent Bolloré, happen to be Saroky's BFF, just like pretty much everyone who counts in the clubby world of French capitalism.

Satirical weekly, Le Canard Enchainé, wrote this snarky headline: "Sarkozy had sworn: No commercials after 8 PM". Rules just apply to the common men, I guess.